Socket-A Chipset Comparison - April 2001

Memory Bandwidth - Linpack

Normally our Linpack graphs are great tellers of the performance story, however with ten different platforms being compared here, the story can get a bit confusing at times.  Don't worry, the chart below will offer a clearer picture but before you skip to it let's point out a few things.  We omitted all the performance figures with Datasets smaller than 384KB, because those will fit perfectly within the Athlon's on-die caches and we are more concerned with platform performance since we are using the same CPU for all of these tests (just varying FSB frequency).

For starters, the difference in performance between the lowest and the highest performer (as is indicated by the height of the line at the very right of the graph) is approximately 30%.  The lowest performers being 100MHz DDR FSB solutions with as little as 800MB/s of peak memory bandwidth, and the highest performers being 133MHz DDR FSB solutions with over 2GB/s of memory bandwidth. 

In spite of the impressive differences in theoretical bandwidth figures, the actual performance difference boils down to a little over 30% between the slowest of the slow and the king of the hill.  If anything this should illustrate how easy it is to get caught up in looking at peak performance numbers and how misleading they can be into making you believe something that honestly cannot happen.

Before we move on, let's allow Linpack to provide a better look at the performance of these 10 platforms.

We picked a particular x-value from our Linpack performance results, in this case the value corresponded to a 2MB dataset size for the test matrix meaning that the performance is limited mostly by the memory bandwidth of the platform since a dataset that large couldn't fit within the Athlon's on-die caches. 

The first interesting thing we notice is that AMD's own DDR platform is outperformed by the ALi MAGiK1, something we would've never expected, especially considering our original look at the chipset. 

The VIA KT133A continues to prove that DDR SDRAM isn't absolutely necessary at this point in time, although it can't be argued that the DDR platforms are the fastest platforms available.  In spite of the MAGiK1's superb performance with PC2100 DDR SDRAM, the chipset is unable to best the KT133A with PC133 SDRAM as it falls approximately 5% behind. 

Without too much surprise, all of the remaining PC100/PC133 solutions fall to the bottom of the charts but what did shock us was the fact that among the bottom 2 performers was the MAGiK1 running at 1000/100 with PC1600 DDR SDRAM.  This is really a peculiar thing to see since the platform performed so well with PC2100 DDR SDRAM, let's keep on digging to see what we find.